


like me.

by ihavebeenslain



Series: our love is six feet under [1]
Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Torture, Jason Todd Has Issues, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Psychological Trauma, another kid is almost beaten to death, very angry jason, very sad jason
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-09
Updated: 2018-05-09
Packaged: 2019-05-04 06:05:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14586597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ihavebeenslain/pseuds/ihavebeenslain
Summary: Alive.He will wish he wasn’t,a small, small voice murmured.





	1. Chapter 1

Jason sat back on his heels, breathing in smoke and dirt with every inhale. His faceplate was unclasped, the night air cool on his feverish skin. The cigarette draped loosely from his lips. Ashes hung in the air before incorporating themselves into the drenched atmosphere.

After slugging through a week with minimal sleep, he was taking a much needed break.

Jason--Red Hood--had finished rounding up the scumbags for the night, and--wow!--stuck to non-lethal rounds.

He still took the liberty of crippling the lot--human traffickers. Aka molesters; pedophiles; rapists.

Bastards.

A growl rumbled in his chest, and he dashed the weakening stub and lit up another one. He took a deep drag, and, sighing, flicked his eyes downward.

His body involuntarily relaxed at the lazy sprawl of old buildings, neglected and left to wear away. Worn and beaten. Like him. Smoke fumed and framed the black night.

It was home.

Shadows that shifted with every sudden shower of headlights; alleyways that tripped over any obscene illumination; Gothamites who knew to stalk in vague directions of home when dark fell. Here, everyone knew night time was bad time.

The shriek of a gunshot reverberated up to him.

Yep.

He inhaled the last of his patience, snuffed out the cigarette, snapped on his faceplate, and leapt.

Jason eased into the descent, a stupid, instinctive grin marching up his face at the familiar burn of air. He loved the feeling of imminence, loved the feeling of momentary suspension--it was a cheap imitation of flying, but one he adored.  

Falling had always been easy for him.

His grappling hook sounded like a scream against tin and brick, holding Jason’s weight as he swung past darkened windows and dimly lit corners. He hit the ground running, racing towards the echo of the first shot.

Another inevitably followed.

Not good.

He tracked the sound residue to an alleyway--of fucking course--and ran in the vague direction of marred heroism. He had hoped for a typical Tuesday--a typical Tuesday of gun-loving amateurs.

He found a kid steeped in his own blood, instead.

A carnage. A one-sided carnage.

13\. 14? _The kid couldn’t be a day older than 15._

He was horribly still. Unmoving, limp, and Jason suddenly thought how cold it would be, to touch the kid.  

Was he? He looked dead. 

 _Like you,_ someone said inside him. _(_ _And inside him, something cracked a little mor_ _e.)_

Jason met the ground in a kneel. He wished that the faint gasps weren't his-- _oh, god,_ _not his--_ but the kid’s-

Then the child shook. Shook with the faintest tremble. His chest stuttering into movement. What sounded like a wheeze whistled into the world.

_Breathing._

Jason swallowed, the beginnings of a panic attack consumed by a surge of relief.

Alive.   

 _He will wish he wasn’t,_  a small, small voice murmured, somewhere layered with the dead parts of a boy left buried six feet under, screaming for someone who would never come.

Jason silenced the voice. The boy. Again.

His eyes climbed over the bloody body, seeing the two holes in the kid’s ankles, the pierced flesh marked with fresh bruises--new--and understood. Understood that someone had shot the kid once so that he couldn’t run, then twice for the hell of it. Understood that the kid could only scream as he was beaten within an inch of his life.

If rage were a color, it would be red.

Red for the blood, red for the missing flesh, red for the fists doused in anger, grief, _fury._

He found the man a block away, carrying a bloodied and dented .44 Mag.

He shot once, twice, at the ankles, with brutal accuracy. The bullets severed each tendon with an agonized scream.

The man would never walk again.

Just like the kid.

Jason crouched, leaning over the contorted body wrenched with pain and half-met screams. The bastard was in the process of retching when Jason’s gloved hand seized his jaw and snapped it shut. _Swallow your own guts._

He was smiling behind his helmet. He was tempted to remove it.

“Lucky you, good sir--karma’s a one-man bitch today.”

 

\---

 

Jason almost didn’t hear the voice until a rough hand yanked him back, back from the red and into an alleyway.

“ _J_ _ason_!”

His name rang in his ears, like a shriek, like a gunshot. Like a bullet in the brain.

He breathed. He smelled of blood. He saw his fists. Red. He saw the man. Red.

He turned to face blue.

Dick.

“Don’t fucking touch me.” Jason’s voice was still raw, working with rage. He had endless stores of it--pain. He would flounder, sink, and drown in his own destructive anger.

And Jason Peter Todd was fine with that. If that’s what it took to stop all of _this_.

His words cut through with a derisive sneer, and he ripped himself from Dick’s grip. If the action hurt, none showed on his brother’s face.

“Jason. You need to stop.” Dick’s voice had softened, placating. Pacifying. As if Jason required soothing. As if he required  _sympathy._ Jason snarled.

“No. _You_ need to stop, Goldie. Stop cooing at me. Stop  _chasing_ me. We both know how well that works out.” He took a breath, sharp, eyes snapping to the blood. Yeah. The golden boy, chasing after _him?_ Never. A bitter grin curled his lips.

He really let loose this time. And he didn't regret it. Never had, never will.

Jason returned his glare to the boy wonder turned independent vigilante--to the man he once _looked up_ to, before the said man became a permanent thorn in his side.

 _Oh_ , how easily things change.

He was trying to say something else.

"I can help-" 

“ _And where were you, Dickie_?" The question is asked with a low growl, punctuated with a bitter sneer. Not that he could really see it. Not that Dick could really hear the unspoken accusation. "Where have you been fucking around, huh? Where have you and Bats been, when a fucking  _kid_ was almost murdered _two goddamned streets from school_?”

He hurt with his words. He wanted them to. Weaponizing them, so that his fists wouldn’t.

Dick stepped back as if lashed. Jason bared his teeth, hand slapping back his faceplate. Rage must’ve been scrawled in every harsh line of his expression, because fear flickered briefly across Dick’s face.

“You want to tell me how to stop myself from murdering an almost-killer?” His voice was a knife in the silence. A lance of contempt. Jason swung a brutalized hand to the beaten body behind him, jeering as he continued, “Because you don’t fucking need to, Dickie--because this scumbag is gonna live with his mistakes for the rest of his life, with two bullet scars in his ankles because he decided to fuck with a traumatized ex-Robin-- _me_!”

He spat them out. Robin. _Traumatized._

This time, Dick flinches. This time, he jerks back from something very, very tangible. His domino doesn’t help mask his blatant horror and heartbreak, tangling together in a pathetic demonstration of brotherly _benevolence_.

His hands fold together, then out, opening to air, towards Jason. Surrender. An underlying desperation holding in the notion. Begging.

Fucking Dick Grayson was begging.

“Jason.” He pleaded. Said his name as if it were a placeholder for everything that could go right. In his case, very, very _wrong._

Jason sneered. There was a slow emptiness opening inside him, and the steady, _familiar_ beat of anger attempted to insert itself into that oh-so-welcoming void.

He wished it could.

Anything--anything at all--right now was preferable to feeling something for Dick, for this self-proclaimed brother of his. For the Golden Boy. For everything he wasn't. For everything he _could_ not _have been._

“Dick.” Jason echoed, voice falling far from enmity and closer to acrimony. It was something he hasn't felt in a while--something he would rather  _not_ feel. “It’s too late for many things.”

His anger was shifting into something else. Melding with the emptiness to create sorrow.

He felt sad _._ Fucking-

_Sad._

Dick’s body reacted, feinting towards him, almost reaching with an outstretched hand.

Jason's step back turned into a stumble and he managed to dignify it somehow with a wide sweep into the black. His helmet clicked quietly back into place. He didn’t want Dick to see it. The vulnerability.

The regret.

_It was too late for many things._

“So stop trying.” Jason murmured. To himself, or to Dick, he wasn’t sure.

_He didn’t want to know._

His body reeled forward, arching to air, and Jason allowed the skies to take him, away from gravity, away from grief. From the oncoming storm.

He rolled once before perching himself on a nearby roof. He knew Dick was still there, watching. Listening.

“Tell the kid I’m sorry.” His voice was barely recognizable through the modulator, but beyond that, in the mask, past the filtering--his voice was distant even to himself. His voice was a whisper.  

His words, tinged with despair.

“Tell him I’m sorry I didn’t come sooner,”--he paused, swallowed, wanted to choke but continued, half praying the words would come through--“and tell him he will survive.”

Jason turned away from the rooftop as his mechanized voice fell forward. An echo drifting through the recesses of alleyways and crime and grief.

 

"Tell him he's strong."

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

_Cripple_.

It’s the only word that echoes in Dick’s mind, long after his encounter with Jason in that alleyway, amidst the red and the memories.

The terrible memories.

_“Will he be ok?” Dick blurts out, stopping a paramedic with a hand on her arm. She tears her harrowed gaze from the battered boy to the fully armored man--her eyes flicker with tired recognition, and he realizes that she has seen this happen many, many times before._

_“I don’t know,” she says. The sirens scream. The lights strike at the darkness. The white and red blur in a mirage of color._

_She removes his shaking hand, gently, carefully, from her body._

_"But he_ will _be crippled for life.”_

Dick sits and stares at the stained, gauntleted hand of his armor, laying like some sort of peace offering on the table before him.

 _Cripple_.

A kid. A kid who probably just started high school, who probably just realized he likes girls or guys or both, who probably just realized what it meant to say _I love you_ , who probably just realized that he had _a whole life ahead of him_ \--

He chokes. A hand comes up to seal the sobs threatening to spill from his lips, and Dick doubles over, suddenly wallowing in a pain he has not felt in a long, long time.

Not since Jason.

Not since he saw that crowbar, heard the maniacal laughter, touched the dirt shielding the soulless body of his dead, beaten brother.

Dick broke because he saw Jason in every bruise accenting the kid’s body, in every wrong angle he had been bent. In his punctured ankles, his marred skin, his resigned posture. And, surely, in his realization that nobody was coming; that there would be no open doors, no ridiculous miracles.

Dick wondered if the kid realized that, somewhere in between the thin line of pain and darkness, there were no such things as martyrs--only those who died too soon.

Jason appeared before him.

Dick remembered the raging. He remembered clambering down from the skyscrapers to investigate the broken cries, only to find his little brother beating the life out of a man who hung limply from a fist of shirt. The man was disfigured in a shape vaguely reminiscent of a dead body, and for the first few moments, Dick truly believed Jason was mutilating a corpse.

Till he saw the broken body of a child some distance away. And suddenly, Dick knew what Jason was doing, because he would have done the same.

He immediately moved to secure the child, yelling into his comm for emergency services, hand fluttering for a pulse and, finding one, gave a heave of pure relief. He immediately moved to tend his wounds, flinching harshly from all of them and forcing himself through all the same.

It took a total of two agonizing minutes. He remembered the steady resonations of the pounding echoing to where he knelt, brutal in every audible crunch of bone.

He wondered how many out the 206 Jason had broken.

Dick remembered calling his name, trying _little wing_ and giving up on verbal initiation in favor of physical intervention.

The light in Jason’s eyes _burned_ him.

Burned him more than his bloodstained fists, more than his callous words and the broken body beneath him.

Jason’s anger had always dragged out a sort of awe from Dick Grayson; before he died, and after.

Last night was no different.

Dick admired Jason’s rage. It lit a fire under the fists he tussled with, fists that he threw at anything warranting his fury, with the will and might of a  _pissed-off guardian god_ \--even if it meant going against the rest of the world. Even if that’s really what happened in most to all cases.

He admired Jason’s capability to survive every fight, picking himself from the ground even if that meant losing a piece of himself in the process. Even if that meant a splintered body and soul, consisted only of slivers of his former self. 

Dick wished he could gather the bits and return them. Slot them back into his little brother like mismatched puzzle pieces.

Because somewhere down the line, Jason had lost the little boy waiting for open doors and ridiculous miracles.

  
\---

  
He had waited until the nurse closed the curtains, dampened the lights, and padded out the room before moving.

He had slunk across the adjacent rooftop, swung across, snaked down, stilled, and now, perched on the side of the hospital wall like it was the most natural thing to do, thought.

Jason hovered on a line he hadn’t crossed in a while. A long fucking while.  

He hadn’t personally engaged with victims since he was Robin. After coming back and donning his new persona, he left behind the idea that he was the “Robin Who Cared”. He left behind people, because people had set him on this path, and he’d be damned to let them ruin him again.

Jason sucked in a breath.

On the other side of the wall lay a boy he couldn’t save.

He tipped his head back--a movement hinged on impatience and exasperation--and eyed the black skies in frustration. Jason was finding incredible irony in all of this.

Is this what Bruce felt? Picking apart the rubble? Finding his ruined body, cut and broken in places that would never, ever be fixed? Seeing the remnants of his failure--his mistake--laying cold and still in his arms?

Jason sighed at the high heavens.

Karma’s a fucking prick. 

He decided to meet the boy he couldn't save.

 

\---

  
The boy’s name was Jonas. Jonas Terry.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I've been meaning to write angsty, angry Jason and. Here it is.
> 
> I wrote this the day before my ap lit exam,,,,to de-streSS,,guess that happened,,,,,


End file.
